City: Bengaluru

Bengaluru is growing, but at a much faster pace than expected. With such rapid urbanization, peri-urban areas are concurrently growing faster beyond the planned rates of infrastructure development of local ecosystems. The random expansion of cities by dissolving or merging the boundaries of nearby cities, towns and villages in a disorganized manner without any foresight poses various social, economic and environmental risks. In Bengaluru and its vicinity too, this has predictably led to an imbalance in terms of growth versus maintenance, witnessed by increasing slums, growing threat of newer and virulent epidemics, and poor access to basic services such as…

  DaanUtsav (formerly The Joy of Giving Week) is an entirely volunteer-driven initiative which encourages people to indulge in any act of giving of their choice. There is no blueprint and the idea is to get everyone to participate in this festival of giving and experience the joy of the act. Started in 2009, the festival is celebrated across the country from October 2nd to 8th. Daan Utsav is a great platform that brings together people from all walks of life and encourages them to share their time, money, material, skill or just love. This festival is like any other…

During the cabinet meeting last week, the State government decided to give a green signal to the metro rail project on Outer Ring Road (ORR), pushing aside the long pending ambitious Bus Rapid Transport System (BRTS) project; hopes of citizens who were rooting for BRTS or multimodal transport options were dashed. Though the proposal to introduce BRTS on the Outer Ring Road was hanging in balance for quite sometime, the plan to lay a metro line on the busy stretch has eliminated the possibility of BRTS. So why did BRTS, which was first conceptualised in 2012 and had a Detailed…

When Bengaluru-based photographer Mahesh Shantaram started working on what became 'Racism in Africa:The African Portraits,' he was only trying to educate himself about the African migrant population living in his country. “I got into this project due to my own ignorance and curiosity,” Shantaram said. “This sort of curiosity and ignorance is a shared experience. This project is a way for me to bridge those gaps.” His portraits of African migrants living in India are on display at the Tasveer Gallery in Bengaluru until September 23rd. Tasveer Art Gallery is the first stop of the exhibition’s five city tour. Wandoh and his…

Representative Image. Photo courtesy: Subhashish Panigrahi via Wikimedia Commons 10-Sep-2016. Train number 17604 Kachiguda Express. I was on my way to Hyderabad from Bangalore. It was around 11.15 pm, I woke up from my already disturbed sleep for two reasons.  Firstly, the roof lights were on. Secondly, amidst the quiet humming noise of the AC sleeper coach and the constant titak-titak-titak-titak from the running train, I heard someone coughing.  When I opened my eyes, I saw a lady in burqa seated on the side lower berth with a man sitting next to her. The man was holding a kerchief to…

Nishanth Dugar in his factory. Pic: Kate Clark Piles of white cloth carry bags cover every inch of the floor in 23-year-old Nishant Dugar’s small Peenya factory. Six women are hard at work; a chorus of sewing machines pound, punch and hammer ceaselessly. Dugar has been making the trek from the Indiranagar office of his company, A S N Entreprises, to his two factories in Peenya since the total ban on plastic in Karnataka meant an end to his former business: manufacturing and selling plastic bags. The plastic ban was first announced in January 2015 and was made official in…

Newspapers announced with glee and celebrated the news that the Metro construction between Silk Board and KR Puram was going to go ahead and will be “fast tracked”. On Twitter, corporate honchos part of the Bengalulru Blueprint Group, congratulated the government for taking the decision. Source: https://twitter.com/kiranshaw/status/776241398622228480 But it was with a fair degree of alarm and shock that the already harassed lot that commutes to the Outer Ring Road read the news. According to this news, Metro Phase 2 construction in this region would now be from Byappanahalli till KR Puram (that line will continue towards Whitefield). Then from KR…

N Manjunath Prasad, Commissioner of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), believes in minimum contact but maximum governance. He is from 1994 IAS cadre. In an interview with Cherry Agarwal, a student of Indian Institute of Journalism and New Media (IIJNM), he talks about a wave of digitisation to put information on public domain, the long term plans of the BBMP, the challenges he faces and more. BBMP Commissioner Manjunath Prasad. Pic courtesy: BBMP Commissioner FB page How has your journey been since 1994 to being the BBMP Commissioner? In 1994 after getting into the IAS I was allotted the West…

What should Bengaluru - institutions and its citizens - do in the immediate run and the long run, considering the Cauvery dispute and the limits to water scenario? Just remember that only a third among us, or maybe half, are in the Cauvery basin, the rest are not part of the Water Tribunal process. This city has been built on a ridge and in the basin of two rivers, though many of us may not even be able to name the rivers into which Bengaluru empties its sewage. Consider this – we are pumping 1400 million litres of water per…

On Monday, (September 12 2016) as I was watching the prime-time news on Kannada TV channels, my child walked in. Sitting beside me, she watched the televised show of miscreants vandalising various places. Suddenly she exclaimed: 'Ammaa!' The TV showed the vandals ransacking an Adyar Anand Bhavan outlet, probably on Mysore Road. She asked me, 'Amma, so there won't be Adyar Anand Bhavan anymore?' I reassured her, 'Yes there will be. These are all temporary problems. Malleshwaram's A2B is intact, so you don't need to worry.' A2B is her favourite hotel and has been a lifesaver for us on the…